Ecomedia Studies

Here’s the link that recently came across the ASLE listserv for the forthcoming Thoreau’s Walden videogame.

I embrace the concept of building a videogame of Walden, but from the promo video, I feel like this particular version is taking the wrong approach, as if the game-builders are denying the platform and media they have chosen. Get rid of the old-timey music and sappy, conventional visuals. What’s great about Walden is its striking weirdness. Squatting down to look back and upside down between one’s legs. Aphoristic quips about maggots in the head like wheat in Egyptian mummies: “The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again; and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy.”

In other words, I want the videogame of Walden that uses maudlin Johnny Cash covers of Nine Inch Nails songs.

Hi all,

Here’s an abstract/excerpt of a presentation I gave at SCMS this year in Boston. The paper was part of a panel on the figure of the laboratory in contemporary film and media studies, and it grew out of some intersecting questions about the problem of scale and thinking about cinema as an environmental technology.

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“Cinematic Testing Grounds: The Environment as Laboratory and the Case of Ghost Bird (2009)”
Kyle Stine
University of Iowa

Ghost Bird (dir. Scott Crocker, 2009) centers on the alleged rediscovery in 2004 of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a species that was thought to be extinct for nearly 60 years. The so-called “Lord God Bird” or “Grail Bird” was the largest woodpecker in the United States and indeed a sort of Holy Grail of birding for those who maintained any hope that it still existed. In March 2004, Gene Sparling, an amateur naturalist, was kayaking in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Arkansas when he spotted what he described as a very large woodpecker with distinctive field marks different from those of the more common pileated woodpecker. Sparling’s sighting spurred renewed hope among ornithologists that the ivorybill might be documented. And documented photographically, since, as Heidegger reminds us, fleeting impressions can hardly satisfy the scientific mind for which everything will come into being if and only if it can be pictured. That which happens only once is for science as good as that which never happened at all.

The crucial moment came in April 2005 when David Luneau, a professor of Engineering Technology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, left his video camera recording while he was canoeing in search of the ivorybill. The few brief seconds of footage, blurry and pixilated and out of focus, were enough to convince some ornithologists that the bird really had been rediscovered. Enhancing and zooming in on the video, analysts measured everything from the field markings on the wings to wingbeat frequencies, even reenacting the original scene with different scale models of ivorybill and pileated woodpeckers. (The reenactments are especially interesting because they use the same camera and attempt to reproduce the same blurry and out of focus conditions as the original.)

Luneau Video at Cornell Lab of Ornithology

These few brief seconds of a bird launching into flight have been the subject of countless analyses and have already made for many rich papers on the social construction of scientific evidence and the evidentiary status of cinematic technologies. All this would be effective fodder for film analysis, and certainly the ornithologists have gone at this film with a rigor that puts even cinemetrics to shame. With no understatement, the film is to ornithologists what the Zapruder film was to the Warren Commission. What I would like to offer instead is the opposite of what all previous analyses have done. Rather than zoom in on the video, I would like to zoom out and to zoom out even beyond its social constructedness as a piece of scientific evidence. I would like to consider it as a mere fact, alongside many other media artifacts, but also as a piece of what Paul Valéry would call a “tremendous new fact,” which is this:  The scale of the drama of Ghost Bird is colossal, so great that it always threatens to slip from sight. It is the scale of determining not the existence of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which can be determined within the frame scale of a motion picture, but its inexistence, which is to say, the inexistence of anything at all, since inexistence is not something represented but something failing to be represented.

Inexistence, if we return to Heidegger, means not being in the picture. Collectively, the efforts of the researchers to document the ivorybill woodpecker take the form of proliferating representations of the habitat where it might be found. Rather than leaving ivorybill sightings to a chance encounter on a kayaking trip or an accidental video spotting, the researchers attempt to control for their evidence, to create what amount to laboratory conditions that might verify their results. They do this by setting up a massive surveillance operation using automated cameras and autonomous sound recording units. Significantly, these technologies record impassively, in a way blindly and deafly, without any regard for what they record. In recording automatically, they allow researchers to exploit what Bruno Latour cites as a fundamental strength of the laboratory: the researchers can now multiply their mistakes. These cameras and autonomous sound units produce piles of empty data, trial runs awaiting a single conclusive piece of information. The vast catalogues of images and sounds, to this point all revealing nothing about the existence of the ivorybill, stand as just so many research “mistakes,” or to play on the language of the film industry, just so many mis-takes—takes that must be shot again.

John W. Fitzpatrick, Director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology presents at the University of California Santa Barbara

In proliferating these mis-takes, the audio and visual recordings of the habitat tend toward representation in totality. They tend away from any contingent not-being-in-the-picture—which is to say, not in the evidence now, or: the ivorybill not in this picture—toward an absolute not-being-in-the-picture, or: not being in any picture. Their “exactitude in science,” to invoke the Borges tale of the cartographers and the empire, extends increasingly outward to determine once and for all that something is nowhere on the map of the territory.

A series of happy coincidences this week.  Having recently completed a review of David Ingram’s recent book The Jukebox in the Garden: Ecocriticism and American Popular Music Since 1960 for the Journal of Popular Culture, I have been thinking a bit about musical ecologies and the work of John Cage, which David nicely summarizes.  Also, I am beginning to formulate plans to co-lead a pre-conference seminar at ASLE 2013 in Denton, TX on the environmentality of games and apps.  Someone I’ve been consulting on those plans is Dave Baker, a media librarian here at UO. Dave led a class session in my media aesthetics class last term and has put together one of the countries most extensive collections of game consoles that are available for students and staff to check out from the library.

Yesterday, Dave took part in an original composition orchestrated by John Russell, “Imaginary John Cage No. 1  (For 12 Video Games)”.  John’s piece was original avant-garde composition created with Dave’s help by mixing the sound from 12 players live gaming experience.  More at Dave’s blog for the event’ linked above. Briefly: ” Twelve video games / instruments are played, live, by twelve players / performers. Audio from each game is routed into a single audio mixer, and from there to the performance space’s speakers. The score is written for the mixer, and details the volume level of each channel at a given time.”

As it turns out, though, the gaming experience, and thus the experience of “Imaginary John Cage” is environmentally problematic.  According to a recent study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, “68 percent of all game console energy consumed in 2010 happened while in idle mode, which equaled 10.8 TWh of energy and about $1.24 billion in electricity costs.” Although video games represent only about 1% of all energy use, more than 40% of US households own at least one console and most of us leave them plugged in and in standby mode all day.  Just something to consider.

I’ll be pondering the significance of “Imaginary John Cage” tomorrow during Earth Day. Perhaps there’s a place for games and a time to turn them off and go outside. A lot of ideas swirled in the avalanche of sound during John and Dave’s incredibly powerful performance.

Here’s John’s brief intro to the piece:

“Imaginary John Cage No. 1 has three movements:

1. benediction
2. her people speechless
3. to see beauty even in

The first movement is spoken and begins “Welcome. Thank you all for coming.” After that, the speaker is welcome to do any number of things that might fall under the title of benedictions. Dave has agreed to do the first movement, which is nice because I wasn’t sure I felt like it (for future reference: the first movement is entirely optional).

However, here is a sketch of how I imagined this first benediction might go:

Welcome. Thank you all for coming. There are a few things that you all should know:

1.  One hundred years has passed since John Cage was born; twenty years ago, John Cage died.
2. Inspired by the work of John Cage (particularly his Imaginary Landscape, no. 4: for 12 radios), we came up with the idea of creating the composition you have come here to experience.
3. Imaginary John Cage no. 1 (for 12 video games) is comprised of three movements.
4. You are currently listening to the first movement, “benediction.”
5. The next movement, soon to begin, is “her people speechless.”
6. The third and final movement is “to see beauty even in.”
7. I solemnly swear that not using capital letters was an accident, not an affectation.
8. (However, the use of parentheses is fast becoming a crutch.)
9. We are not afraid of anything either.”

As part of an ongoing effort to expand the scope and scale of ecomedia studies, we’ve asked a number of folks from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies to post abstracts of their conference papers or send something to us to post.  Today’s entry is from Jennifer Malkowski, Post-doctoral Fellow in Film and New Media at Smith College, who has graciously submitted the abstract for her paper…

“It’s Not Your Story”: Ethnography, Community, and Collaboration in Ten Canoes”

Submission for 2012 SCMS Panel: Cinema and Community, Cinema as Community

This paper examines the film Ten Canoes and its production process as complex sites of cross-cultural collaboration and community building through filmmaking. “Australia’s most ambitious and most expensive cross-cultural film project to date,” Ten Canoes emerged from an extensive 2006 collaboration between established, white Australian director Rolf de Heer and the Indigenous Australian community of Ramingining (populated by the Yolngu and located in Arnhem Land). Using the well-funded production as an opportunity for cultural renewal and the reclaiming of nearly-lost traditions, the people of Ramingining collectively fought to make the film in “the proper way,” subordinating Western production practices to Yolngu culture. In casting, for example, the requirements of local kinship laws took precedence over considerations like physical appearances or acting talent.

In storytelling, making traditional canoes, or this new venture of making a film, what seems most important to the Yolngu is how things are done, process – in contrast to the values of Western cinema, where the filmic product is the enduring commodity (artistically and financially). This cultural imperative of Ramingining’s community is thematized in the film, through self-reflexive explorations of process in canoe-building, ritual dance, and the telling of Ten Canoes’ story itself – presided over by a playfully antagonistic Yolngu narrator.

Shaped by the Ramingining community, the form of Ten Canoes resists the narrative conventions of mainstream, Western cinema, instead celebrating the slowly-paced and multi-layered local style of Yolngu storytelling – even at the risk of alienating national and international audiences who represent the film’s potential for profit and critical acclaim.Although burdened by some of the problems common to collaborations between people from disparate and unequal social positions, Ten Canoes showcases an intricate negotiation between the process-oriented storytelling of the Yolngu and the product-oriented traditions of Western cinema industries, offering an instructive case of collaborative and community-based filmmaking.

Bio: Jennifer Malkowski received her Ph.D. in Film and Media this May from the University of California, Berkeley and has just started a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Smith College. Her dissertation, “‘Dying in Full Detail’: Mortality and Duration in Digital Documentary,” focuses on documenting death, how the development of video and digital technologies has altered that practice, and how the temporalities of death and digital media are mutually informing. Her work has been published in Film Quarterly and the anthology Queers in American Popular Culture.

This link takes you to a cool project.